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nancy@nancykeane.com
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Wolfe,
Tom.
THE RIGHT STUFF
New York : Bantam, 1980.
IL YA
ISBN 0553275569
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you seen the movie “Top Gun?” Well, The Right Stuff is about the original
Top Gun pilots. These are the guys who survived the early days of
jet planes with the high casualty rate. These are the days of the legends
Chuck Yeager, Gus Grissom, Pete Conrad, John Glenn. You’ll
recognize some of them as astronauts. In your lifetime space shuttle
missions have been commonplace. The Right Stuff takes you back to
the beginnings of the space race. Sputnik embarrassed the United
States. We weren’t number 1. We weren’t even number 1 in putting
a man in space. The Russians beat us there as well. The Right
Stuff shows us these men with all their human frailties. Alan Shepard
was the first American in space—and he peed his suit waiting for liftoff.
Gus Grissom blew the hatch on his Mercury spacecraft before the helicopter
could hook on and it sank to the bottom of the ocean. Once John Glenn
orbited the earth everyone forgot that Alan Shepard had been the first
American in space. Tom Wolfe takes you behind the scenes for a close
look at both the technical details of the Mercury space flights and the
personal lives of the astronauts. (Mary Huebscher, Librarian, Holy
Cross of San Antonio, San Antonio, TX
marwood45@hotmail.com) |
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SUBJECTS:
Astronauts -- Biography.
Astronautics -- United States. |
© 
Permission is granted for the
noncommercial duplication and use of this resource, provided it is substantially
unchanged from its present form and appropriate credit is given.
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